Fire World

by Chris D'Lacey

  “For the purpose of imagineering,” said Lefarr.

  4.

  In essence, we are farmers,” Colm Fellowes was saying, as he prepared Harlan and Bernard for their trek to the summit of the Isle of Alavon. He tossed a sandal aside from the pile he’d been working through and chose one with a wider base for Bernard’s left foot. “We miss our wives and our children, of course, but what we have here we are rightly proud of. There is not a man among us who would not defend Alavon to his death.” He tapped Bernard’s ankle as he found a good fit. “That pair will serve you well when we reach the stiffest part of the climb. They won’t be entirely comfortable, but they will keep the calluses and blisters down. Harlan, you seem ill at ease.”

  Harlan snapped a dead twig and let the pieces fall. “I was thinking about the greenery,” he said. Earlier, he had accompanied Colm and Bernard to Brotherton Field, as it was now known, where Colm had offered Bernard useful advice on what help he could expect from the rest of the tribe, what tools were available to work the new crops (which, after their amazing first flourish, were now dormantly soaking up the heat of the sun), and the best way to carry water to the field, with which to irrigate the fledgling plants.

  “The greenery?” Colm repeated.

  “After what I learned at the meeting this morning, it fills me with an odd kind of sadness to see it.”

  “But the plants are our lifeline,” Colm said, frowning.

  Bernard raised a hand in a gesture of explanation. “I think I know what Harlan’s getting at,” he said, walking in circles to test his new footwear. “It was the study of plants, in particular the efficiency with which they converted light to energy in the photo:synthetic process, that indirectly led to a greater understanding of the laws of quan:tum mech:anics and the relationship between light, perception, and consciousness — and hence the ability to imagineer.”

  “But that was afterward,” said Harlan, staring grimly at the hill.

  “Afterward? I don’t understand,” Colm said. He pulled on a backpack and whistled to Lefarr.

  “Bernard is talking about the way we fine-tuned our imagineering once we discovered we were capable of it. But how we made the breakthrough is still a mystery. We have always been able to travel in our minds, to think freely, to dream of better things. We can still do it here, in a place where our fain is useless, and I find that strangely liberating. But what was it that initiated the profound leap in consciousness that ultimately enabled us to make stable constructs of our thoughts? And was it worth it, if it left Co:pern:ica like this?”

  Colm Fellowes shrugged. “How did the universe evolve from a cloud of gas? What defines the way a seed, once watered, divides into leaf and stem? How does a firebird’s tear replenish the earth? Maybe some questions are too big to answer — and therefore better left alone.” He turned and checked the position of the sun. “We should leave. The journey isn’t long but it is hard and we need to reach the ruins before nightfall. Keep drinking from your vessels. If your breathing becomes difficult, signal me or Mathew. The air grows thinner toward the peak.”

  “How?” asked Bernard. “It can’t be high enough to register a significant change of atmosphere?”

  Colm Fellowes looked at them both in turn. “You can ponder that mystery along the way. Trust me, it’s better to think than to talk.”

  From a nearby hut, Lefarr and the medic, Terance Humbey, came to join them. After a further check of provisions and a few more words of advice from Terance, the party made its way to the rising ground. Men working singly in the fields to either side leaned on their improvised hoes and watched them go.

  “Why are they so solemn?” Bernard whispered to Lefarr.

  “They fear we may not come back,” he replied.

  That stopped Harlan before he’d struck the path. “Why?” he asked directly. “What are you keeping from us?”

  “We should tell them, Mat,” Colm Fellowes said, the ground almost cracking with the weight of his stride. He stopped and took it upon himself anyway. “Men have been known to go mad up there. They say the ruins are haunted.”

  “By Agawin?”

  Fellowes glanced back at Lefarr and said, “Some travelers have returned from the Isle with a tale — about a flying beast many times bigger than any firebird. They say it guards the tower, though none of us have seen it from the settlement below. They say its fire can steal the air from within a man’s lungs.”

  “Roderic attaches a name to it,” said Mathew. “He was a scholar of history once. He identifies this creature by the anonymous term ‘dragon.’”

  Bernard gulped and loosened the neck of his robe. “A fire-breathing creature bigger than a bird?”

  “You may both turn back if you wish,” Mathew said.

  And what kind of choice is that? thought Harlan. He pressed on, dropping in behind Colm Fellowes. “Have either of you ever encountered this ‘dragon’?”

  “We have both felt its presence,” Mathew said.

  “With respect, that tells me nothing.”

  Colm Fellowes tightened his lip. He nudged a few pebbles to one side of the path. “You will have the opportunity to test your skepticism when we stand at the doorway to the tower, Professor.”

  “If it’s ruined, what is there to see?” said Bernard, adopting Colm’s example of avoiding the stones; they felt like small explosions on the soles of the feet.

  “At the center of the tower is a dais,” said Lefarr, “made from the same gray stone as the building. It rises to about the midheight of a man and is circular, equidistant with the walls of the tower. Carved around the edges of its flat, upper surface are symbols no one has been able to interpret. At its center is an image.”

  Bernard paused to quench his thirst. His slightly bloated cheeks were already beginning to glow with the first signs of perspiration. “Of the beast that haunts the place?”

  Lefarr stopped and opened his own water vessel. “No. The figure of a man in the creature’s image.”

  “A man — with wings and fire?”

  “And is that Agawin?” Harlan said.

  “We believe so,” said Mathew.

  “The Followers say the dais is his tomb,” Colm added.

  Bernard’s lips made a gentle smacking sound as he wiped them dry of water.

  “There has never been a successful excavation,” said Lefarr, in anticipation of the scientists’ next question.

  “But there have been attempts?” Harlan pressed him.

  Mathew capped his water vessel with a firm thump. “There won’t be one today,” was all he said. And at that moment, it began to rain.

  Bernard instinctively reached for a hood. Not finding one attached to his robe, he accepted it, as Colm and Mathew had done, and let the water run where it would.

  “Tread carefully now,” Mathew advised them. “The rain is refreshing but it makes the way slippery. There is no cover here other than the ruins. The quicker we reach them, the better. We won’t speak again unless someone is in trouble. Are we clear?”

  “Clear,” said Harlan, adjusting his backpack. Bernard nodded, and they both fell into step.

  Despite Lefarr’s warnings, the pathway had enough grit mixed with the mud to make sure their sandals made a good, sound purchase. There were imbalances, but no embarrassing falls, and the party moved ahead in open file, at reasonable pace. All around them the sky was gravid with rain, which did little but inflate the dark character of the land and kept “sightseeing,” as Bernard called it, to a minimum. Harlan, likewise, despite his curiosity about Agawin and the creature that allegedly guarded the tower, could find little room in his mind to think of anything other than his next sure step. But as the muscles in his thighs began to burn, announcing the onset of the final incline, he suddenly felt a swift loss of pressure in his lungs and had to drop back, a few paces off the others. He gestured to Colm that he was fine, just pausing for a drink of water. But before he knew it he was on his knees, clutching at his chest for any kind of breath.
A high-pitched whine made his eardrums sing. Blood pooled against the wall of one nostril. His eyeballs felt as if they wanted to burst. He could still see Colm, but only as a hazy S-shaped line against a sky suddenly swollen with heat. He cried out to him, but the thinned air folded his words right back. And when he stretched a hand forward to signal for help, something inhuman came to meet it.

  He felt nothing but the pressure waves crossing him at first. His robe billowed and his modest shock of hair fanned out. Claws with the strength to crush bones into paper took him by the shoulders and lifted him as if he were an empty shell. He was some way off the ground when he heard the muffled shouts of the men below. More pressingly, another voice was in his mind.

  Beware the Shadow of Isenfier.

  The next thing Harlan Merriman knew, his body was impacting on the slopes of Alavon and his consciousness was back with the other three men.

  “Harlan?! Harlan?! Are you all right?” Lefarr’s voice swam into play. “Colm, pick him up. Carry him to the tower. Lay him down there.”

  “In the tower?”

  “On the dais itself if you have to! Move!”

  And Harlan felt himself lifted again, cradled in the arms of the once-engineer.

  When he did become fully awake, the rain had slowed to a creeping mizzle. He was lying by a curving wall of stone that reached for the sky like a funnel to the stars. “The tower,” he whispered.

  “Yes,” said Bernard, kneeling beside him. He rested the back of his hand on Harlan’s forehead.

  Lefarr swept up, offering a vessel. “Drink,” he said.

  Harlan shook his head. With Bernard’s help, he managed a sitting position. Once again his back was wracked with pain. His left ankle was a bloated ball of bruises.

  “What happened, Harlan?” Lefarr asked urgently.

  “I don’t know,” he muttered.

  “You were floating,” said Bernard.

  Harlan coughed a little. “Floating?”

  “You were ten feet off the ground when we reached you,” said Lefarr.

  Harlan looked all around him. For one moment he experienced a quieter repeat of the singing in his ears. “Where is it? Where did it fly to?”

  “Where did what fly to?” Bernard asked.

  “The creature. The dragon that picked me off the hill.”

  Bernard and Lefarr exchanged a glance. “All we saw was you hanging limply in the sky. There was no dragon.”

  Harlan stared at the dais. There was blood in his mouth and fear in his heart. He touched the stones he was propped against and said, “It goes by a name, this invisible thing. This creature that drives your men to madness.”

  Lefarr ran a thumb across his drying lips. “You commingled with it?”

  “It with me.”

  “Was it Agawin?”

  Harlan looked at the shifting clouds, framed by the circle of stone above. “No,” he said. “It called itself Gawain.”

  5.

  We should return to the Shelter,” Colm Fellowes said, letting his gaze roam slowly across every patch of sky. He was standing with his back to the other three men, just beyond the arch-shaped opening that would have brought him into the tower proper.

  “Harlan is in no state to travel,” said Lefarr. “He may have broken his foot.”

  Colm turned, imploring Mathew to look at him. “Two men, in turns, could carry him down with ease. If nothing else, let me go back for Terance.”

  “No one leaves yet,” Harlan said quietly. “Bernard, help me up.” He put out an arm. Using Bernard’s shoulder as a crutch, he struggled to his feet, holding his swollen ankle off the ground.

  Colm strode up to the archway, placing his hands on the walls to either side. The surface stonework crumbled against his palms, echoing, perhaps, the feeling in his heart. “That thing is all around us,” he whispered darkly, hoping to induce some sense into Mathew. (He had not even bothered to question Harlan’s statement.) “Night will be upon us within the hour. If we don’t go now, it may be too late. We cannot fight what we cannot see.”

  “We’re not here to fight it,” Harlan said. He grimaced as he tried to put pressure on his ankle. “We’re here to solve a riddle. Besides, it could pick us off at any moment. An invisible being has no need for the cloak of darkness. Relax, Colm, it means us no harm.”

  Colm struck a hand against the wall and stepped back. “Men have been known to put a knife through their heart after they’ve encountered the soul of this beast. How can you speak of it in gentle terms when it picked you up and cast you aside like a leaf?”

  “It needed to prove something to me.”

  “And what was that?”

  “That it’s real, not imagined.”

  Colm threw up his hands in despair.

  “I understand your anxieties and I’m not trying to belittle them,” said Harlan, “but I’m certain that this dragon has never intended to prey on the tribe. Its auma is at such an intense vibration that it simply overwhelms the minds of most men. It’s the fear of what they don’t understand that kills them, not the fire of the beast.”

  Lefarr regarded Harlan thoughtfully, tilting his head in a searching manner. “What exactly did you learn from it, other than a name?”

  Harlan hobbled over to the dais. He brushed some loose dirt off the circle of symbols and asked Bernard to clear the far side as well. “As you know, in the commingled state it’s possible to assimilate something of the cohost’s nature. This dragon is a trans:dimensional being. A wandering spirit, lost in time.”

  “It’s seeking our help?”

  “Possibly, yes.”

  Colm let out a hopeless sigh.

  “It gave me a warning,” Harlan said.

  Now Colm turned and looked sharply at Lefarr.

  “It was telling me to beware of something. Have you heard of the Shadow of Isenfier?”

  “Ice? What is ice?” Colm lifted his shoulders. “We know of fire, but —”

  “Not a conjunction of words,” said Harlan. “I heard just one. I’m sure of it.”

  “Izenfire?” Mathew tried.

  “Close,” said Harlan. “It means nothing to you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Me neither,” said Bernard, shaking his head.

  Harlan tightened his lip. “Then all we’re left with is this.” He laid his hands flat on the dais. “Tell me, Mathew, why does the tribe ‘follow’ Agawin?”

  Lefarr came to stand beside him. “The legend was in place well before I arrived.” He pointed to the center of the dais, where there was indeed a worn-down image of a winged man. “In the early days of Alavon, when the tower was first explored, a superstitious conviction began to grow around this figure. Its basis was simple enough: If we demonstrated enough belief in our winged man, he would protect us from starvation and the stuff of nightmares.”

  “A religion?” Harlan looked up in surprise.

  “Not a word you hear every day,” said Lefarr, “on any part of Co:pern:ica. But when a man is stripped of his fain, he sometimes turns to faith as a substitute. The men of Alavon found their comfort in the myth of Agawin, even though nothing was known of his life, perhaps because nothing was known of his life. I should explain, by the way, that in some men the superstition runs so deep that they dare not even look upon the figure in front of you.”

  “I’m afraid that might have to change,” said Bernard.

  Harlan raised his eyes to meet the tech:nician’s. “You’ve spotted something?”

  “These signs have been carefully arranged,” said Bernard. “At a casual glance, they appear to be just an irregular jumble. But they’re actually a complex of four overlying patterns.”

  Lefarr murmured in agreement. “Yes, I see it. Could they be star maps — or constellations?”

  “Not from any system I know,” said Bernard. He stretched his fingers over the carvings and made a few comparative measurements. “Do you see the small depressions where some of the ‘stars’ would be?”

  Lef
arr nodded.

  “Put your fingertips into them.”

  “It’s a key,” breathed Harlan, his excitement growing. He placed all ten digits into the patterns. “Colm, come inside. We need four to complete the circle.”

  Colm Fellowes hovered in the doorway still. “This is madness,” he hissed at Mathew. “Who knows what dangers the dais holds. We’ve already had a warning. We should leave, Mat. Now.”

  “No,” said Mathew. “I believe in these men. If you abandon this, Colm, we three will simply return tomorrow with another volunteer. We need to resolve this. We owe it to the tribe.”

  Colm Fellowes ran a hand across his shaven face. He and his conscience fought for a moment. Then he stepped across the threshold, into the circle. The natural ruddiness of his cheeks began to blanch as he saw the symbol of the winged man, but he set his fingers down where shown.

  “What now?” said Lefarr, as Harlan filled the last ten spots. His gaze jumped from hand to hand. Nothing was happening.

  “We must commingle,” said Harlan.

  Colm gritted his teeth. “You know that’s not possible in the Dead Lands.”

  “It may be enough to show like intent. Close your eyes. Concentrate on knowing the meaning of the dais.”

  But still nothing happened, though a gentle vortex of air was beginning to strafe the inner walls of the tower. It rippled the loose parts of everyone’s clothing and stirred up the dust around the base of the dais. And though it did not have the strength to move a man, its agitated wail was enough to worry Colm.

  “This isn’t working,” he said. “We should leave, while we can.” He pulled his fingers away.

  “No, wait,” said Harlan, his eyes racing over the patterns again. “Colm, come back. I think we need to overlap hands. Like this.” He demonstrated quickly to Lefarr, placing his right hand where Mathew’s left would have been.

  “Yes,” said Bernard. “Yes, that could work. Our arms will mimic the crisscrossing theme.”

  “Colm, come on,” Mathew implored him. “One more try, then we go.”

  Colm took up position and closed his eyes again.